Die Neue Zeit
24th January 2011, 06:29
Real Austerity: Ancient Origins and Structural Approaches to Luxury Consumption
“Austerity, the 14th century noun defined as ‘the quality or state of being austere’ and ‘enforced or extreme economy,’ set off enough searches that Merriam-Webster named it as its Word of the Year for 2010, the dictionary's editors announced Monday.” (Russell Contreras)
Towards late 2010, there was much public discussion about government budget cuts after all the deficit spending towards “privatizing the gains and socializing the losses” and vulgar stimulus, without the Chartalist insights that only persistent government deficit spending is what creates government money and even expands the credit system, and that governments must spend first before collecting taxes. It should be obvious that any bourgeois rhetoric of “austerity” leaves the bourgeoisie unscathed while making everyone else pay for bourgeois crises.
The word may be a 14th century noun, but its origins are ancient. Despite an overly liberal account of ancient history by Hal Draper before his more balanced assessment of “socialism from above,” Kautsky was correct in listing Lycurgus, Pythagoras (of the mathematical theorem that bears his name), and especially Plato as part of an ancient, “long line of Socialists.” Draper ignored pre-industrial class relations before late feudalism, under which both non-communal common ownership relations beyond state ownership of land and equal ownership relations beyond those over all other non-possessive property were not feasible, and under which the chattel slave classes and their populist democracy were simply incapable of long-term political organization (at least until the only successful but woefully belated chattel slave revolution in history, the Haitian Revolution). Within these pre-industrial class relations, the austere way of life for the Spartan ruling class and the Pythagoreans’ rather monastic communal consumption formed the ideal basis for the Guardians’ way of life in The Republic, Plato’s controversial yet political work:
Then now let us consider what will be their way of life, if they are to realize our idea of them. In the first place, none of them should have any property of his own beyond what is absolutely necessary; neither should they have a private house or store closed against anyone who has a mind to enter; their provisions should be only such as are required by trained warriors, who are men of temperance and courage; they should agree to receive from the citizens a fixed rate of pay, enough to meet the expenses of the year and no more; and they will go to mess and live together like soldiers in a camp. Gold and silver we will tell them that they have from God; the diviner metal is within them, and they have therefore no need of the dross which is current among men, and ought not to pollute the divine by any such earthly admixture; for that commoner metal has been the source of many unholy deeds, but their own is undefiled. And they alone of all the citizens may not touch or handle silver or gold, or be under the same roof with them, or wear them, or drink from them. And this will be their salvation, and they will be the saviours of the State. But should they ever acquire homes or lands or moneys of their own, they will become good housekeepers and husbandmen instead of guardians, enemies and tyrants instead of allies of the other citizens; hating and being hated, plotting and being plotted against, they will pass their whole life in much greater terror of internal than of external enemies, and the hour of ruin, both to themselves and to the rest of the State, will be at hand. For all which reasons may we not say that thus shall our State be ordered, and that these shall be the regulations appointed by us for our guardians concerning their houses and all other matters?
Consciously or not, the Paris Commune itself followed Plato’s recommendation on subjecting its public officials to a standard of living no higher than that for a skilled worker by means of “average workers’ wage” pay levels.
On the subject of consumption, the pre-industrial ruling classes sometimes sought to restrain extravagance in spending on food, clothing, and furniture as well as jewelry and other luxury goods. They did this, though, by means of rather ineffective sumptuary regulations. There is a more fundamental point to be made, and it is one of productive labour vs. unproductive labour. In my earlier work, I offered two frameworks for this, Marx’s and my own, the former being the basis for his class analysis in Das Kapital. In Chapter 16 of Volume I he wrote:
On the other hand, however, our notion of productive labour becomes narrowed. Capitalist production is not merely the production of commodities, it is essentially the production of surplus value. The labourer produces, not for themselves, but for capital. It no longer suffices, therefore, that they should simply produce. They must produce surplus-value.
Under Marx’s framework, the production of luxury goods yields surplus value. However, the production of only a select few luxuries historically has eventually contributed, both quantitatively and qualitatively, to the broader development of society’s labour power and its capabilities, such as the automobile. In 2006, Paul Cockshott and Dave Zachariah provided a contemporary, highly quantitative, and mathematical framework for productive labour vs. unproductive labour. As noted at sufficient length:
A problem with Marx's formulation is that whilst it readily categorises the self-employed, state officials or parsons as unproductive, it runs into difficulties with some other categories. For instance are bank employees or the workers in advertising agencies productive or unproductive? The advertising agency clearly produces a commodity – adverts, the sale of which pays its employees wages and returns a profit on top. At first sight they would appear to be productive. Similarly it can be argued that bank employees produce a commodity 'financial services' and that their labour earns the bank a profit.
[…]
One might argue that bank labour and advertising were non-productive because they were merely concerned with the transfer of property between owners rather than with the production of final consumer goods, but this would go beyond what either Smith or Marx formally defined.
[…]
Smith's introduction of the concept of unproductive labour has to be seen in the context of a polemic against the aristocracy and in favour of the manufacturing bourgeoisie in 18th century Scotland. The dissipation of part of the surplus product by an idle and licentious aristocracy employing small armies of personal retainers meant that these people were not employed building canals, roads or steam engines. If the surplus product was consumed unproductively, as had been the case under pre-capitalist economic formations, then the productivity of labour improved at a snails pace from century to century. If instead, it were reinvested in capital goods, then the productivity of labour, and thus national wealth grew in geometric progression.
[…]
This process of production of surplus value is tied up with the very improvements in productivity that require persistent capital investment – Smith's concern. Note that the production of relative surplus value is an economy-wide phenomenon. When cotton mills cheapened clothing, they enabled the same real wage to be met with less money. The beneficiaries were not just the mill owners but all employers who could now pay lower wages. Relative surplus value is distal not proximate.
In the main therefore, to say that labour is productive of surplus value is to say that it is productive of relative surplus value, which means that it must be:
1) Susceptible to technical advance.
2) Produce a commodity that contributes to the real wage.
[…]
Any sector that directly or indirectly sustains the workers' consumption bundle is productive […] If our economy is specified at industry level we can tell what industries are productive. If it is in greater detail we will gain information on what functions of it are productive […] Contrawise, a change in the form of ownership of the means of production does not itself shift sectors from productive to unproductive.
[…]
In modern capitalist economies the more obvious unproductive sectors are public administration and the police-military apparatus, but also capitalist activities such as armaments, private guards, wholesale trade, advertisement, financial and juridical services, luxuries, etc.
Some sectors which have traditionally been treated as unproductive in Marxist discourse, such as parts of state education, may now be seen to be productive since they enter indirectly into the reproduction of the labour force and thus affect the ratio between necessary and surplus labour.
[…]
Despite the movement of more and more goods into the real wage, there always remains a differentiation by price of goods into luxuries and necessities, since without this differentiation the propertied classes would be bereft of a means of expressing their social superiority.
[…]
Our conclusion is that productive labour includes all work necessary to the support of the direct producers. This conclusion is well grounded in input/output analysis and lends the concept of productive labour a modern progressive polemical edge.
Based on this framework and even my own, consider one measure that goes beyond mere sumptuary regulations to suggest a structural approach to luxury consumption such as of luxury yachts. In the same year that there was much public discussion about government budget cuts, Simon Romero of the Caracas Journal reported a mixed situation in Venezuela:
The golfers still argue over handicaps. The waiters still serve flutes of Moët & Chandon. Sunlight still kisses the grounds laid out in the 1920s by Olmsted Brothers, the esteemed American landscape architects.
The idyll of the Caracas Country Club, a bastion of opulence for Venezuela’s elite, still seems intact.
But perhaps not for much longer.
Beneath the veneer of tranquillity, a feeling of dread prevails. A state newspaper published a study this month saying that if the government expropriated the land of the Caracas Country Club and that of another club in the city, housing for 4,000 poor families could be built on the parcels.
The idea is hardly far-fetched. After all, the government has seized hundreds of businesses this year alone, and thousands of people are homeless because of heavy rains, accentuating a severe housing shortage. At the behest of President Hugo Chávez, flood victims have already moved into hotels, museums, the Foreign Ministry and even his own office. (Mr. Chávez says he will stay in a tent given him by Libya’s leader, Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi.)
[…]
The reaction to the club’s predicament reflects that of the polarized country itself. José Bejarano, 34, a motorbike courier who works in a neighborhood on the club’s southern fringe, said it was hard to shed any tears for such an island of privilege.
[…]
Some members contend that Mr. Chávez’s rise had already changed life within the club forever, reflecting a chasm between members who have openly clashed with the president and others who have discreetly opted to profit from contracts with his government.
[...]
“You see the government apparatchiks paying private homage to the oligarchy they publicly ridicule, and vice versa,” Ms. Neumann said of the atmosphere at the club that day. “The former out of a desire to belong, the latter out of a desire to survive.”
The words “expropriated” and “seized” were used to promote bourgeois and petit-bourgeois outrage despite, as noted earlier, the existence of eminent domain or compulsory purchase as a widespread legal mechanism (due monetary compensation but without prior owner consent) among even developed bourgeois-capitalist states that ironically violates the more propertarian Article 17 of the “Universal Declaration of Human Rights.” While eminent domain can be used for achieving some actually immediate demands instead of furthering things like residential gentrification, it can be used for achieving quite a bit more, from growing the public ownership and rental tenure over all land to recycling or reconfiguring the biggest luxury goods (such as luxury yachts) to restructuring unproductive enterprises and industries into productive ones.
Because such actions collectively point to a last defense of constitutional guarantees to the right of private ownership of productive and other non-possessive property, by means of due monetary compensation, this reform does not meet the Hahnel criterion for facilitating other threshold demands exclusively, or even immediate and intermediate ones. Due monetary compensation does not take into account timeliness, and there have been many cases where the courts have failed to enforce both factors, despite their propertarian allegiances. Also, because one of its aims is a more structural and not regulatory approach to luxury consumption, it is not so closely related to the measure of aligning the interests of “agent” officials in all political and related administrative offices with the interests of the “principal” population as a whole by means of aligning standards of living (towards some average standard of living for professional and other skilled workers).
How does this reform enable the basic principles to be “kept consciously in view”? The perspective and principle of class strugglism and also the principle of transnational emancipation are obvious, going back to the beginning about contrasting this with leaving the bourgeoisie unscathed while making everyone else pay for increasingly global bourgeois crises. Meanwhile, the principle of social labour is addressed with regards to productive labour vs. unproductive labour.
REFERENCES
Audacity of 'austerity,' 2010 Word of the Year by Russell Contreras, The Associated Press [http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20101220/ap_on_re_us/us_word_of_the_year]
Thomas More and his Utopia by Karl Kautsky [http://www.marxists.org/archive/kautsky/1888/more/intro.htm]
The Republic by Plato [http://www.molloy.edu/sophia/plato/republic/rep3b_txt.htm]
Das Kapital, Volume I by Karl Marx [http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch16.htm]
Hunting Productive Work by Paul Cockshott and Dave Zachariah [http://www.dcs.gla.ac.uk/~wpc/reports/unprod3b.pdf]
A Venezuelan Oasis of Elitism Counts Its Days by Simon Romero, Caracas Journal [http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/28/world/americas/28venez.html]
“Austerity, the 14th century noun defined as ‘the quality or state of being austere’ and ‘enforced or extreme economy,’ set off enough searches that Merriam-Webster named it as its Word of the Year for 2010, the dictionary's editors announced Monday.” (Russell Contreras)
Towards late 2010, there was much public discussion about government budget cuts after all the deficit spending towards “privatizing the gains and socializing the losses” and vulgar stimulus, without the Chartalist insights that only persistent government deficit spending is what creates government money and even expands the credit system, and that governments must spend first before collecting taxes. It should be obvious that any bourgeois rhetoric of “austerity” leaves the bourgeoisie unscathed while making everyone else pay for bourgeois crises.
The word may be a 14th century noun, but its origins are ancient. Despite an overly liberal account of ancient history by Hal Draper before his more balanced assessment of “socialism from above,” Kautsky was correct in listing Lycurgus, Pythagoras (of the mathematical theorem that bears his name), and especially Plato as part of an ancient, “long line of Socialists.” Draper ignored pre-industrial class relations before late feudalism, under which both non-communal common ownership relations beyond state ownership of land and equal ownership relations beyond those over all other non-possessive property were not feasible, and under which the chattel slave classes and their populist democracy were simply incapable of long-term political organization (at least until the only successful but woefully belated chattel slave revolution in history, the Haitian Revolution). Within these pre-industrial class relations, the austere way of life for the Spartan ruling class and the Pythagoreans’ rather monastic communal consumption formed the ideal basis for the Guardians’ way of life in The Republic, Plato’s controversial yet political work:
Then now let us consider what will be their way of life, if they are to realize our idea of them. In the first place, none of them should have any property of his own beyond what is absolutely necessary; neither should they have a private house or store closed against anyone who has a mind to enter; their provisions should be only such as are required by trained warriors, who are men of temperance and courage; they should agree to receive from the citizens a fixed rate of pay, enough to meet the expenses of the year and no more; and they will go to mess and live together like soldiers in a camp. Gold and silver we will tell them that they have from God; the diviner metal is within them, and they have therefore no need of the dross which is current among men, and ought not to pollute the divine by any such earthly admixture; for that commoner metal has been the source of many unholy deeds, but their own is undefiled. And they alone of all the citizens may not touch or handle silver or gold, or be under the same roof with them, or wear them, or drink from them. And this will be their salvation, and they will be the saviours of the State. But should they ever acquire homes or lands or moneys of their own, they will become good housekeepers and husbandmen instead of guardians, enemies and tyrants instead of allies of the other citizens; hating and being hated, plotting and being plotted against, they will pass their whole life in much greater terror of internal than of external enemies, and the hour of ruin, both to themselves and to the rest of the State, will be at hand. For all which reasons may we not say that thus shall our State be ordered, and that these shall be the regulations appointed by us for our guardians concerning their houses and all other matters?
Consciously or not, the Paris Commune itself followed Plato’s recommendation on subjecting its public officials to a standard of living no higher than that for a skilled worker by means of “average workers’ wage” pay levels.
On the subject of consumption, the pre-industrial ruling classes sometimes sought to restrain extravagance in spending on food, clothing, and furniture as well as jewelry and other luxury goods. They did this, though, by means of rather ineffective sumptuary regulations. There is a more fundamental point to be made, and it is one of productive labour vs. unproductive labour. In my earlier work, I offered two frameworks for this, Marx’s and my own, the former being the basis for his class analysis in Das Kapital. In Chapter 16 of Volume I he wrote:
On the other hand, however, our notion of productive labour becomes narrowed. Capitalist production is not merely the production of commodities, it is essentially the production of surplus value. The labourer produces, not for themselves, but for capital. It no longer suffices, therefore, that they should simply produce. They must produce surplus-value.
Under Marx’s framework, the production of luxury goods yields surplus value. However, the production of only a select few luxuries historically has eventually contributed, both quantitatively and qualitatively, to the broader development of society’s labour power and its capabilities, such as the automobile. In 2006, Paul Cockshott and Dave Zachariah provided a contemporary, highly quantitative, and mathematical framework for productive labour vs. unproductive labour. As noted at sufficient length:
A problem with Marx's formulation is that whilst it readily categorises the self-employed, state officials or parsons as unproductive, it runs into difficulties with some other categories. For instance are bank employees or the workers in advertising agencies productive or unproductive? The advertising agency clearly produces a commodity – adverts, the sale of which pays its employees wages and returns a profit on top. At first sight they would appear to be productive. Similarly it can be argued that bank employees produce a commodity 'financial services' and that their labour earns the bank a profit.
[…]
One might argue that bank labour and advertising were non-productive because they were merely concerned with the transfer of property between owners rather than with the production of final consumer goods, but this would go beyond what either Smith or Marx formally defined.
[…]
Smith's introduction of the concept of unproductive labour has to be seen in the context of a polemic against the aristocracy and in favour of the manufacturing bourgeoisie in 18th century Scotland. The dissipation of part of the surplus product by an idle and licentious aristocracy employing small armies of personal retainers meant that these people were not employed building canals, roads or steam engines. If the surplus product was consumed unproductively, as had been the case under pre-capitalist economic formations, then the productivity of labour improved at a snails pace from century to century. If instead, it were reinvested in capital goods, then the productivity of labour, and thus national wealth grew in geometric progression.
[…]
This process of production of surplus value is tied up with the very improvements in productivity that require persistent capital investment – Smith's concern. Note that the production of relative surplus value is an economy-wide phenomenon. When cotton mills cheapened clothing, they enabled the same real wage to be met with less money. The beneficiaries were not just the mill owners but all employers who could now pay lower wages. Relative surplus value is distal not proximate.
In the main therefore, to say that labour is productive of surplus value is to say that it is productive of relative surplus value, which means that it must be:
1) Susceptible to technical advance.
2) Produce a commodity that contributes to the real wage.
[…]
Any sector that directly or indirectly sustains the workers' consumption bundle is productive […] If our economy is specified at industry level we can tell what industries are productive. If it is in greater detail we will gain information on what functions of it are productive […] Contrawise, a change in the form of ownership of the means of production does not itself shift sectors from productive to unproductive.
[…]
In modern capitalist economies the more obvious unproductive sectors are public administration and the police-military apparatus, but also capitalist activities such as armaments, private guards, wholesale trade, advertisement, financial and juridical services, luxuries, etc.
Some sectors which have traditionally been treated as unproductive in Marxist discourse, such as parts of state education, may now be seen to be productive since they enter indirectly into the reproduction of the labour force and thus affect the ratio between necessary and surplus labour.
[…]
Despite the movement of more and more goods into the real wage, there always remains a differentiation by price of goods into luxuries and necessities, since without this differentiation the propertied classes would be bereft of a means of expressing their social superiority.
[…]
Our conclusion is that productive labour includes all work necessary to the support of the direct producers. This conclusion is well grounded in input/output analysis and lends the concept of productive labour a modern progressive polemical edge.
Based on this framework and even my own, consider one measure that goes beyond mere sumptuary regulations to suggest a structural approach to luxury consumption such as of luxury yachts. In the same year that there was much public discussion about government budget cuts, Simon Romero of the Caracas Journal reported a mixed situation in Venezuela:
The golfers still argue over handicaps. The waiters still serve flutes of Moët & Chandon. Sunlight still kisses the grounds laid out in the 1920s by Olmsted Brothers, the esteemed American landscape architects.
The idyll of the Caracas Country Club, a bastion of opulence for Venezuela’s elite, still seems intact.
But perhaps not for much longer.
Beneath the veneer of tranquillity, a feeling of dread prevails. A state newspaper published a study this month saying that if the government expropriated the land of the Caracas Country Club and that of another club in the city, housing for 4,000 poor families could be built on the parcels.
The idea is hardly far-fetched. After all, the government has seized hundreds of businesses this year alone, and thousands of people are homeless because of heavy rains, accentuating a severe housing shortage. At the behest of President Hugo Chávez, flood victims have already moved into hotels, museums, the Foreign Ministry and even his own office. (Mr. Chávez says he will stay in a tent given him by Libya’s leader, Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi.)
[…]
The reaction to the club’s predicament reflects that of the polarized country itself. José Bejarano, 34, a motorbike courier who works in a neighborhood on the club’s southern fringe, said it was hard to shed any tears for such an island of privilege.
[…]
Some members contend that Mr. Chávez’s rise had already changed life within the club forever, reflecting a chasm between members who have openly clashed with the president and others who have discreetly opted to profit from contracts with his government.
[...]
“You see the government apparatchiks paying private homage to the oligarchy they publicly ridicule, and vice versa,” Ms. Neumann said of the atmosphere at the club that day. “The former out of a desire to belong, the latter out of a desire to survive.”
The words “expropriated” and “seized” were used to promote bourgeois and petit-bourgeois outrage despite, as noted earlier, the existence of eminent domain or compulsory purchase as a widespread legal mechanism (due monetary compensation but without prior owner consent) among even developed bourgeois-capitalist states that ironically violates the more propertarian Article 17 of the “Universal Declaration of Human Rights.” While eminent domain can be used for achieving some actually immediate demands instead of furthering things like residential gentrification, it can be used for achieving quite a bit more, from growing the public ownership and rental tenure over all land to recycling or reconfiguring the biggest luxury goods (such as luxury yachts) to restructuring unproductive enterprises and industries into productive ones.
Because such actions collectively point to a last defense of constitutional guarantees to the right of private ownership of productive and other non-possessive property, by means of due monetary compensation, this reform does not meet the Hahnel criterion for facilitating other threshold demands exclusively, or even immediate and intermediate ones. Due monetary compensation does not take into account timeliness, and there have been many cases where the courts have failed to enforce both factors, despite their propertarian allegiances. Also, because one of its aims is a more structural and not regulatory approach to luxury consumption, it is not so closely related to the measure of aligning the interests of “agent” officials in all political and related administrative offices with the interests of the “principal” population as a whole by means of aligning standards of living (towards some average standard of living for professional and other skilled workers).
How does this reform enable the basic principles to be “kept consciously in view”? The perspective and principle of class strugglism and also the principle of transnational emancipation are obvious, going back to the beginning about contrasting this with leaving the bourgeoisie unscathed while making everyone else pay for increasingly global bourgeois crises. Meanwhile, the principle of social labour is addressed with regards to productive labour vs. unproductive labour.
REFERENCES
Audacity of 'austerity,' 2010 Word of the Year by Russell Contreras, The Associated Press [http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20101220/ap_on_re_us/us_word_of_the_year]
Thomas More and his Utopia by Karl Kautsky [http://www.marxists.org/archive/kautsky/1888/more/intro.htm]
The Republic by Plato [http://www.molloy.edu/sophia/plato/republic/rep3b_txt.htm]
Das Kapital, Volume I by Karl Marx [http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch16.htm]
Hunting Productive Work by Paul Cockshott and Dave Zachariah [http://www.dcs.gla.ac.uk/~wpc/reports/unprod3b.pdf]
A Venezuelan Oasis of Elitism Counts Its Days by Simon Romero, Caracas Journal [http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/28/world/americas/28venez.html]